November 19, 2010

Facebook page may have caused stress for ex

Social networks may not be for the broken hearted.

An 18-year-old man, depressed after his girlfriend broke up with him, appears to have had asthma attacks brought on by logging into the social media site, five Italian doctors wrote in the journal Lancet.

She had deleted him from her page and “friended” other men. The former boyfriend used a new name to become friends with her again so he could see this.

The site seemed to induce shortness of breath each time he looked, wrote the doctors.

“The [man's] mother was advised to ask him to measure the peak expiratory flow before and after internet login and, indeed, ‘post-Facebook’ values were reduced, with a variability of more than 20 percent,” wrote Dr. Gennaro D'Amato of the High Speciality Hospital A Cardarelli in Naples, Italy.

“In collaboration with a psychiatrist, the patient resigned not to login to Facebook any longer and the asthma attacks stopped.”

Once the doctors took a full history and physical exam, they concluded it was seeing the girlfriend on Facebook that triggered the attacks. They concluded that social networks could be a new source of psychological stress and should be considered by doctors assessing others with asthma.

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About Picture of Health

Meredith Cohn has been a reporter since 1991, covering everything from politics and airlines to the environment and medicine. A runner since junior high and a particular eater for almost as long, she tries to keep up on health and fitness trends. Her aim is to bring you the latest news and information from the local and national medical and wellness communities.

Andrea K. Walker knows it’s weird to some people, but she has a fascination with fitness, diseases, medicine and other health-related topics. She subscribes to a variety of health and fitness magazines and becomes easily engrossed in the latest research in health and science. An exercise fanatic, she’s probably tried just about every fitness activity there is. Her favorites are running, yoga and kickboxing. So it is probably fitting that she has been assigned to cover the business of healthcare and to become a regular contributor to this blog. Andrea has been at The Sun for nearly 10 years, covering manufacturing, retail , airlines and small and minority business. She looks forward to telling readers about the latest health news.